


won the battle (lost the heart)

by Nevcolleil



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-10 02:34:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6935254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/pseuds/Nevcolleil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Lenny... my hero,” Lisa drawls like she’s teasing, but her throat sticks a little too much.</p><p>(If there’s ever been a time in her life when Lisa Snart needed a man to lie to her, it is now.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	won the battle (lost the heart)

**Author's Note:**

> This is my take on the Mick-Tells-Lisa concept. Heed warnings: this is not a fix-it fic, and there are references to Lewis's treatment of his children, particularly one incident I made up because I am apparently a very bad person.

There’s a little playground about a block and a half away from the place she and Lenny grew up, covered in graffiti and half rusted away now. It’s probably always been dirtier than it should be, although Lisa doesn’t remember it that way, and it’s within peeping distance of a government housing complex so run down, Lisa _can’t_ remember when it had an actual door, instead of some plywood triple bolted to the frame of the building’s front entrance.

For a time, this was her favorite place to be. Lenny was the only one who ever took her here, and she felt safer clinging to the rust-caked chains of the playground’s one swingset, or scooting down one of it’s poorly leveled kiddie slides, than she did anywhere their dad might show up. Lenny never took his eyes off her out here. He was always within shouting distance of wherever she played, ready to catch her if her foot slipped on the monkeybars or to fuss if she swung too high and jumped off - or to threaten some stupid little kid if he even _looked_ like he might give Lisa trouble.

“Lenny... my hero,” Lisa drawls like she’s teasing, but her throat sticks a little too much, makes the words come out ugly, thick and wet. She thinks about sitting on one of the swings, but she wants Lenny close this time, and he never liked sitting on those, so she drops down onto the cracked lip of one of the kiddie slides instead.

They haven’t been back here since Lisa was ten, so she’s never seen her fully grown brother trying to make himself comfortable among all the child-sized play equipment.The image of him arranging his long limbs into an indian-sit in the gravel at her feet makes Lisa want to laugh out loud.

She’s definitely drunker than she intended to be.

“Never really liked it here, did you?” she says with probably more gravity than that, not particularly groundbreaking, realization deserves.

“Because it’s a dump,” she hears him drawl, but she sees the curl of his lips. He knows how she feels about this place. How she _felt_ , anyways. “But it was better than keeping you cooped up in the house, especially when Dad was around.”

When Dad was around and not laying into one of them - usually Lenny. Usually only because one of his buddies was over, and even the scumbags Lewis brought over from time to time weren’t scummy enough not to notice things and make comments about them.

‘ _I’m glad he’s dead_ ,’ she wants to say. ‘ _I’m glad you got to kill him._ ’ She never got to say it before; when the Flash drug Lenny off to prison, she was too mad about him being locked up _for killing the bad guy_ to be thankful. Now she doesn’t particularly want to talk about dead people, or bad guys, so she thinks about the last time she and Lenny sat together near this slide.

Sat directly under it, actually. Lisa thinks about crawling under the dirty plastic chute that’s replaced the steep metal slide that had been there then, but isn’t sure she could manage it. Just thinking about Len trying to fit under there with her now makes Lisa actually laugh out loud.

“Hey, Lenny... remember the time I came out here by myself?”

She knows that half-pissed, half-fond glare of his so well, she could picture it in her sleep.

“Do I? Hard to forget when your kid sister’s too dumb to come in from the rain.”

Lisa laughs again and thinks about flipping him off, but-

But she remembers what she was doing out here that night, and it wasn’t being dumb. She knows Lenny remembers it too.

“I coudn’t-” Lisa realizes too late she’s bringing the conversation back around to a place she doesn’t want to be, where there isn’t any laughing or teasing. But she’s already started talking about it, and Lenny hated- He _hates_ when she starts stuff she can’t finish.

“I couldn’t just listen,” she says so quietly, it’s barely a whisper, but Lenny hears her. Probably hears the apology in her voice too. It’s been years and years and she still feels like shit for the two weeks Len spent in bed, sick, after that night... on top of other things.

“Wasn’t your fault, sis.” She’s heard him say that maybe a million times.

But he’s right. She had been _dumb_. He’d been so angry at her for running around in this neighborhood alone, at night - angrier than she’d ever seen him before. (And scared, she knows. Really, _really_ scared.)

The skies had opened up right about the second he’d found her, huddled under the slide sobbing into the knees of her pink tights, but she wouldn’t come out, wouldn’t come home no matter what he said, no matter what he threatened or promised. 

(He wouldn’t grab her and drag her out. Lenny never, _never_ , touched her with force. Not once, no matter for what reason.)

Eventually he’d crouched down in front of her and taken his coat off, wrapped it around her shoulders. He’d curled over her, protecting the front of her from the worst of the rain better than the skinny, rust-eaten slide above them could have done.

He’d sheltered her with his own, bruised and bloodied body. Dad had been _insensible_ that night. Lenny was always doing things, saying things, when it looked like Lewis might turn his attention to Lisa, to keep the old man’s eyes on him, but that night none of his tricks had been working. So Lenny’d tried harder. And Dad had responded exactly as Lenny’d expected.

It hurts her to think about it, every time. Lisa never thought she’d ever have something to think about that could possibly hurt worse, but she finds herself clinging to that moment tonight. To that memory.

“The soup was,” she argues, quietly. 

He shrugs, not moving to do anything about the moisture dampening her face this time around.

“Okay... I’ll give you the soup,” he says, smirking, and Lisa thinks, after a couple of gasps, that maybe it’s because this new hurt is never gonna stop hurting. She’d rather think about any other thing, no matter how awful, because this hurt’s the only one that literally feels like it might kill her. “How the hell did you burn canned soup, Lis?” she hears Len say like he can’t see her shaking and panting.

He smiles, and she knows she should laugh. He’d want her to laugh. She always did when he teased her for being so _bad_ at trying to be a good sister that week and taking care of him. But now she can’t remember if she ever told him how goddamned beautiful his smile is, how it always made her feel safer than even this stupid, dump of an old playground had...

But of course she didn’t, did she? Because he’s her big, dumb jerk of a brother... and little, dumb train wreck baby sisters don’t say “touchy feely” stuff like that to their brothers, even when they know no one else’s said it as often as they should have, and Lisa _can’t breathe_ -

“Yeah you can,” says a voice as gritty as the gravel she’s tripped right off the lip of the slide and fallen upon. Big hands are on her shoulders. She can’t tell if they’re what’s shaking so bad or if she is; maybe it’s both. “Come on, Lis... Breathe. _Breathe_ , Lisa.”

“What, are you following me around now, too?” she says, more or less in one full sentence, minus one or two shaky stops and starts.

She doesn’t open her eyes; _won’t_. Can’t look up and see only Mick crouching down in front of her. The only one who’s come out here with her tonight, anywhere besides in her own head.

All day long, it’s been Mick everywhere she goes. Working up to telling her he and Lenny’d had another falling out, she’d thought the first time she’d caught him lurking. Then she’d seen his face up close, his eyes - the fire in them frighteningly banked in a way she’s never seen before - and she’d known, even before he’d begun his stilted explanations.

“He’d want me to look out for you,” Mick says, in that _stupidly_ somber voice he’s got now. He sounds older, saner, _sadder_ than she’d ever thought he could - which would all be perfectly fine, of course, except that it makes him sound _honest_. And if there’s ever been a time in her life when Lisa Snart needed a man to lie to her, _it is right fucking now_.

Lisa shrugs off his touch, laughs off his words - as much as she can make a sound like a sickly sort of laughter - and tries not to scream because it’s too late for that. She’d known the second she’d seen the ashes in Mick’s eyes, and Mick’s always been a shit liar when it comes to her brother anyhow.

“He’d want, huh? He’d want _you_... to look out for _me_...” Mick flinches with every word, but he doesn’t back away except to let his hands fall to his sides and to clench his jaw a little as he listens. “ _He_ would want to _be_ here with me,” she shouts the truth that’s maybe the most overdue, “if not for _you_!”

It’s overdue and too late to matter, and Mick probably misunderstands why she feels the need to say it - the ashes in Mick’s watery gaze outnumber embers just a little more every moment - and Lisa wants to go back to quietly speaking with her brother’s ghost. To tell Mick to go away and come back when she can sound anything but as pissed off (at the entire fucking _universe_ , literally, at this moment) but once she’s started shouting she simply can’t stop.

“He’s taken a lot for me, Mick... Beatings and- and fucking rainshowers... and bad fucking soup-” Obviously Mick can’t get the references, but there’s barely a flicker of confusion across his face before open hurt sets back in, because the next part is plenty damned clear. “And so much worse... He could have taken you. To get back home... To get back to _me_ , he could have fucking taken you...”

He would have, if it would have been anybody in that Ocu-whatever other than Mick. No friend, no “partner”, no teammate would have been enough for Lenny to leave Lisa alone back here in present time with some maniac and his time minions running around loose.

Lisa looks Mick in the eye and wills away her anger, her rage, just long enough to look at him and try to make him see it’s not all directed at him. Not _at all_ directed at him.

Lisa could use a lie herself right now - a promise that there’s still someone who’s gonna take the punches for her. Who can shield her from the awful stuff she’s too dumb to hide away from. That everything’s gonna be alright. But it was Lenny’s job to promise her that, and as much as he’d loved her - more than any other brother could; more like their father somehow couldn’t - he’d kick her ass if she lied to Mick now.

“He could have let you die for him if you were anyone but _you_ ,” Lisa says, and waits for Mick to try and argue that he hadn’t almost died for Len first. That Len had taken his place for some other reason besides the obvious.

“He was tryin’ to be a hero-” Mick starts, but her eyes are still on his and Lisa can see how little he means it.

“Lenny was _always_ a hero,” she says. These last five months Lisa gets that Len did a lot to try and let other people see that. But there’s only one reason he’d go as far as to jump in on someone else’s suicide mission - for anyone besides her - and playing hero wasn’t it.

Lisa watches Mick’s eyes close - listens past her own harsh breathing to hear his - watches how careful, how still, he just crouches there for a long moment and doesn’t speak.

“I know.” 

At first, Lisa doesn’t even hear the words. She’s getting ready to say some version of them herself, and Mick’s voice is a lot closer to growling than speaking most of the time.

Then he repeats himself. “I know...”

Mick Rory is quietly crying in front of her, and the truth is, Lenny protected her all his life, but he taught her too. He taught her to care about more than just how to stay protected.

Lisa nearly has to come up to her feet to get her arms around the bulk of Mick as he shudders, only pulling back when he shifts as if to get away from her.

That’s not what he’s doing though. Mick pulls a thin silver chain out from the neck of his henley, and the tears still coursing down Lisa’s cheeks pick up a little when she recognizes the beaten up ring hanging from it.

“Punk slipped it in my pocket at the last minute.”

“Lenny had some timing, huh?” is all Lisa can think to say. And she wraps her arms back around Mick as best she can when he’s the one to latch on to her this time.

**Author's Note:**

> Is it silly that I made myself cry with this? Title comes from "Ghosts" by Banners. The ending may feel a bit abrupt. This is another emotional purge which is hopefully interesting to someone other than myself :P


End file.
